Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

In interviews, several important GDR personalities and also GDR citizens comment on the events of October 1989.

This portrait shows Black cartoonist Oliver Harrington from New York, who fled to the GDR. For his political drawings, he drew on worldly anecdotes and his love of storytelling. Director Hans Hattop later taught videography at the University of Film and Television.

A Little Boy in the ruins of World War II and the white lie of an old man - after a story by Wolfgang Borchert.

Short film about foreign affairs

Gitti lives in Berlin. She's single and decides to put an ad in the personal to find her perfect man. She gets a lot of responses, however she is quite choosy.

Student film depicting recess at a grade school.

Student film about hiding Jews during the Second World War.

Short student film about a latchkey child in the GDR.

A documentary portrait of the everyday life of teenagers in Mecklenburg.

Short documentary

A chronicle of the events in Dresden in the fall of 1989, which began on October 4 with the passage of refugee trains from Prague and the associated riots. Among many others, a doctor who describes the injuries of police officers and demonstrators, young demonstrators who were arrested and a couple whose son disappeared have their say.

Rainer Burmeister (director) tells a story about everyday working life of 46 young Mozambican people in the GDR who were employed as contract workers. Among them is 20-year-old Luisa, who worked in the mining industry and, like the others, is now training to be a craftswoman.

The film tells the story of Hans and Peter, who protested in the Johannesburg ghetto in 1976. There, they witnessed the murder of 300 black pupils and students by racist police forces. The film allows them to talk about what happened.

Sibylle Schönemann’s film about abortion lets young and older women speak; women who were forced to abort by their partners or who chose to carry the baby to term despite predicted difficulties. Assembled as a kind of collage, a round table alternates with stylised passages, while the camera also shows moments in a clinic right before and after the procedure. The attitude vacillates between drama and affirmation of life. Liberal perspectives, with one exception, are left out. Schönemann, together with Tamara Trampe, almost managed to take up the complex issue in a feature film.

Andrees’ graduation project approaches the perky 14-year-old Jacki mainly through her social environment: the stressed patchwork family mother, the solitary long-distance truck driver father, the eclectic neighbourhood. The closer the film gets to its protagonists, the freer the movements of the camera become, gliding through a studio as if in a trance or flying over the nocturnal motorway as if over a UFO landing strip.

It’s only after the separation from her husband that another man tells her how valuable she is: the Chladek family, she’s a teacher, he’s a student. The first few years were nothing but quarrels: the Surau family, he’s a plumber, she’s a postal worker. Should she really intend to get further education at evening school, he won’t accept this: the Lehmann family, he’s a locksmith, she’s a lecturer. Three thirtysomething couples live in the Potsdam high-rise behind whose windows Petra Tschörtner looked for her graduation film. Long interviews that pierce the surface at once, equally revealing and oppressive. Promptly awarded a prize at the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.